The advancement of computer and display technologies has increased the amount of information people interact with. Even though the computer and display systems add some automation to data entry processes, there is often still human involvement. In some cases, the data entry involves interactions between two or more humans. For example, a customer of a business may communicate with an employee of a business regarding a request or an order. The employee of the business often enters the customer's request into an electronic terminal of some type. Often the customer may be selecting from among many different offerings of the business, including many options, and/or sub-options of products or offerings of the business. The employee is typically using an order entry screen that may contain a large amount of information associated with all the available options.
In some cases, an order entry screen may include trees or tiers of menus which allow the employee to narrow down to the specific product the customer is requesting and/or options associated with that product. Businesses often attempt to offer more products and more variations of their products to be more competitive, to offer appealing alternatives to a wider range of customers, or for marketing reasons. In some cases, it can be difficult to quickly find the information on the display that the customer is asking about and/or requesting. In one specific example, a fast food restaurant may have a relatively large menu of food options. When a customer begins to order items, it may be difficult for the employee to quickly find the requested item(s) on the order entry screen from among all the different available options.
The challenges described above may be compounded by additional factors including: a complex menu with many items, a menu with similar sounding items, a menu with multiple items which use some of the same words, language or accent differences between the customer and the employee, a noisy background environment, communication between the customer and the employee occurs over a communication medium that makes the communication more difficult, high density displays that include a large amount of information on a single screen, employees who have little or no familiarity with the order entry screen, reconfiguration of order entry screens placing items in locations that are different than the locations employees have become used to, and/or multiple order entry screens.